by Joanna Jenkins
Publisher: Allen & Unwin, 2025
Review
by Carol Woeltjes
Why was nobody looking for her? Why was it only her mother who cared?
We meet Bea as she moves through the darkness, too scared to use her phone to light the way, but knowing enough to get the rifle from the lockbox on the back of the ute and to hide when she sees the lights approaching.
But Bea doesn’t make it home and no one but Victoria, Bea’s mum, seems concerned by her disappearance. The local police don’t care and even her friend doesn’t seem concerned. In her desperation Victoria goes to Ruth, the city lawyer looking after the town’s small legal practice while to local lawyer has a holiday. Ruth tries to find Bea, only to be stonewalled, until a wealthy local is found dead and it doesn’t look like an accident.
The Bluff is dominated by strong female characters all striving in a man’s world and often dealing with the after-effects of that very place, and it’s from their perspectives that the story is mostly told. We have Ruth, the lawyer, Evie, a farmer and Bea, a young woman searching for love and acceptance.
But there is another viewpoint, that of Gazza – and this is Joanna Jenkins masterstroke, the juxtaposing of events from both a male and female angle. It shows how we often talk past each other and interpret the same events so very differently.
The novel also moves back a few months in time. I found this incredibly enlightening; it showed me what had come before so I could build the characters and their world in my head. Some of the characters also appear in Jenkins previous novel and I loved when prior events were alluded to. It made me feel like the characters had a life before I met them.
To say this novel is character driven is true, but it is also propulsive in its pacing, particularly in the last third of the book that seemed to fly by. The novel touches on themes of abuse and deception at a personal level and as a wider societal perspective. It forces you to see both sides and to question your loyalties. It’s incredibly believable and the scarier because of it. And I didn’t see that ending coming.
Publisher’s blurb
From the bestselling author of How to Kill a Client comes a page-turning rural thriller of loyalties and lies, murder and greed.
People like Dash didn’t die. He was only what? Mid-thirties? Well off. Adored. By some anyway. World at his feet. Well, Myddle at his feet, which was his world.
Ruth Dawson has taken a break from big city law to fill in for a few months at a mate’s small-town legal practice in Myddle. It’s not what she’s used to . . .
So when she hears the front door of her office open she’s expecting a weird demand, or a question she doesn’t know the answer to. But it’s Bea Baulderstone’s mum, worried that she hasn’t seen her seventeen-year-old daughter for five days, and Constable Gazza Parker is refusing to report the girl missing.
Ruth tries to find Bea, but Myddle is a wall of indifference. Then Dash Rogers is found at his farm gate, dead from a gunshot wound, and suddenly the town is very interested in Bea’s whereabouts.